This invention relates to shelving and rails for mounting electronic price displays in retail stores. Pricing the thousands of items on supermarket shelves has traditionally been an arduous and time-consuming task. In the past, legions of stock clerks were kept continuously busy pricing everything from bottled juice to soup cans. Over the years, there were some improvements in pricing methods such as bar coding, but a truly cost-effective and time-saving pricing method became available only with the advent of the electronic shelf label.
As the name implies, an electronic shelf label replaces paper price tags on supermarket shelves with a plastic housing containing an electronically activated liquid crystal display. This display provides shoppers and supermarket employees with accurate and timely pricing, product, and merchandising information.
With electronic shelf labels, shoppers can rely on the price they see at the shelf edge to be the same as the price that is scanned at the checkout counter. In addition to ensuring price integrity for supermarket customers, the system serves as a valuable management tool. Each electronic shelf label contains memory registers that can store and display on demand product information other than prices. Two-way communications capability allows the electronic shelf labels to receive price, product, merchandising, or ordering data and to transmit responses as well.
In one system, electronic shelf labels are wired in a store-wide network. Electronic shelf labels on store shelves and gondolas are wired to a controller that communicates with a computer in the back of the store. This wired-in system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,553,412, which is incorporated herein by reference. The means and methods to collect, maintain, and use location information on each electronic shelf label and the product it represents is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,241,467, Failing et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 5,245,534, Waterhouse et al., which are incorporated herein by reference. This information is then used to cause all electronic shelf labels in an area or sub-area to change their displays in response to a user request initiated by a hand held unit, a special purpose module, an initiator, or a display function switch.
A wireless system has been developed and is described in WO 96/27957, which is incorporated herein by reference. The wireless electronic shelf labels are radio transponders and display price and product information received via RF signals from antennas mounted to, below or above the store ceilings. One previously used structure employs aluminum shelf rails along with labels connected by wiring. But such a structure does not work well with a wireless system in which radio waves are used for communication between the individual electronic shelf labels. The metal interferes with the transmission of radio waves used in the wireless system, causing problems in communicating price changes and product information to the electronic shelf labels.
Conventional steel shelving has a front curved surface to hold strips of paper describing and pricing the item on the shelves. Some steel shelving has top and bottom returns on the front curved section, referred to as a C-channel. There are many ways to mount other items (including price display rails) to the steel shelves when it includes the C-channel because items can be braced against the returns. Some existing steel shelves do not have a return on the top edge, making it difficult to mount items securely to the shelf.
A means for mounting items to shelves without a C-channel and a non-metal shelf rail for use with the wireless electronic shelf labels and adaptable for use with conventional supermarket shelving would have significant commercial impact.